In an interview Monday morning with CNBC, Berkshire Hathaway CEO and billionaire Warren Buffett was asked what he thinks of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her views of Wall Street.

“I think that she would do better if she was less angry and demonized less,” he responded. “I believe in hate the sin, love the sinner, and I also believe in praising by name and criticizing by category.”

He continued that while there are “plenty of other candidates” whose political style he doesn’t agree with, “I do think it’s — I think it’s a mistake to get angry with your, with people that disagree with you,” he said of her. “In the end we do have to work together… And it does not help when you demonize or get too violent with the people you’re talking to.”

A small bipartisan group of senators on Thursday introduced legislation that would break up Wall Street’s megabanks by separating traditional banking activity from riskier financial services.

The bill, called the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, has an uncertain future, but it shows some lawmakers’ frustration that banks have only continued to grow since the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, is one of the sponsors of the bill [along with] Republican Senator John McCain from Arizona, Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington, and Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine.

The legislation would bring back elements of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which divided commercial and investment banking, and was repealed in 1999. It would separate the operations of traditional banks with accounts backed by the FDIC from riskier activities such as investment banking, insurance, swaps and hedge funds.

There is only one thing more Kafkaesque than the ongoing Wall Street frauds and that is watching a live United States Senate investigation of a diabolical settlement the banks themselves concocted to repay the victims of their own fraud. Such was the case yesterday when Senators Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, and Elizabeth Warren grilled regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve along with outside consultants over allowing banks to hand pick the consultants to do their foreclosure reviews, negotiate confidentiality agreements with them and pay them directly.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in checks from the Foreclosure Review settlement will start going out today, eventually topping $3.6 billion in the cash portion of the settlement, and yet it was revealed during yesterday’s Senate hearing that it was the actual banks that engaged in the illegal foreclosure actions that tallied up and classified their wrongdoing under various degrees of harm; deciding themselves how many people would receive $300 and how many $125,000.

As the November election approaches, the White House seems to be ending its Rip Van Winkle-like slumber and has begun crawling out of the bubble of its own making. Many fear it’s a bit late.

The shakeup of President Obama’s economic team is long overdue. As Larry Summers slithers back to Harvard to save his tenure and write his book, he is likely to be replaced by exactly the wrong kind of person—a business executive, appointed to try to appease the Repugs and the Right. (Summers was paid $586,996-a-year at Hahvard and picks up all kinds of consulting deals on the side from Wall Street.)

This maneuver won’t work of course because nothing Obama does will ever please them because they need him as their piñata, and a symbol of failure. He claims to see that but just can’t seem to get his appeasement gene in check, notes the Naked Capitalism blog:

“As much as some will be pleased to see Larry gone (he was a leading advocate of bank-friendly policies), his replacement is certain not to represent a change in philosophy….

Has anyone else noticed that one of the hallmarks of the Obama presidency is the proliferation of “Czars”? There seems to be a Czar for pretty much anything you can think of, whether it’s Medicare, the War on Drugs, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Consumer Protection (that would be Elizabeth Warren) or Intellectual Property.

One thing they have in common is that very few of them have been confirmed by the Senate, so they are essentially given significant executive powers with no congressional scrutiny as to their suitability for the post or the agenda they bring to their roles.

Wikipedia reports that of 39 Czar titles doled out by Obama, 33 of them were appointed without Senate confirmation. Don’t think his predecessor, George W. Bush, was much better though: of 32 Czars he appointed, 27 were not confirmed by the Senate. Note that who is and is not a Czar is sometimes unclear, as the titles given to the individuals usually differ.… Read the rest

“This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going.”—Woody Allen in the New York Times

“The former chairman of Lazard in London who is now chairman of Barclays, once said that the only two things that would survive a nuclear war were cockroaches and Lazard. On the evidence of the past few years, he underestimated the tenacity of the rest of the investment banking industry”—William Wright, Editor, Financial News, London

Hooray, Elizabeth Warren is to become a Special Assistant to President Obama in charge of setting up the Consumer Protection Bureau that she conceived. Alas, it is not to be the independent agency she wanted but a bureau within the Federal Reserve Bank, a branch of government that is really run by big banks which and did virtually nothing to protect consumers when they needed help the most.

For the Obamacrats, this is a good move in political terms because the White House had been battered by the Democratic base to appoint the outspoken Warren to the job, Asked about the issue at his recent press conference, he was his usual coy and cautious self.… Read the rest